Lena Yarinkura (born 1961) is an Aboriginal Australian artist from the Rembarrnga and Kune language groups from Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. She is often credited for being the innovator of contemporary fibre art, producing multiple acclaimed works as well as creating a new school of fibre sculpture. She is a member of Maningrida Arts & Culture, an arts and crafts centre in Maningrida, Northern Territory.
Yarinkura was married to Kamarrang Bob Burruwal, who died in 2021. The couple worked together as a team, and most of the artworks created by either of them before Burruwal's death are collaborations.
Early life Yarinkura was born in 1961Alexander, G. (2004). Lena Yarinkura. In Tradition Today: Indigenous Art in Australia (pp. 178–179). essay, Art Gallery of New South Wales. in Buluhkarduru, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, into the Yirritja moiety of the Yolngu peoples.Jones, J. (2009). Lena Yarinkura. In N. Foreshaw & B. Parkes (Eds.), Menagerie: Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture (pp. 140–145, 162). essay, Sydney; Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design: Sydney; Australian Museum. She was born into three clans, namely, the from the Rembarrnga, Kune, and Burnungku clans and as a result, she is part of the Gotjjan subsection.
Yarinkura's life at Maningrida, an Aboriginal community located around east of Darwin on the Liverpool River in northeast Arnhem land, in the traditional country of the Kunibidji people, involved close contact with her mother, a skilled weaver and artisan, as well as her father's younger brother, Jack Wawee (var. Wawi) Yarinkura's mother, Lena Djamarrakyu, taught her how to do fibre art using pandanus fibres. Her father, Willie Mardangiya, died when she was a young child, leading to his younger brother, Jack Wawee, taking over as her father figure.Baum, Tina. Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia: From the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection. DelMonico Books, 2016 Yarinkura grew up surrounded and immersed in her rich culture and learned the important ancestral stories and cultural teachings from both her parents and Elders in the community. From childhood, she was able to make traditional Aboriginal fibre forms such as dilly bags, large fish nets, and ceremonial dance belts, all of which served a utilitarian purpose in her community. She mastered all these techniques.
Career Her career as a contemporary fibre artist jumpstarted with her marriage to Bob Burruwal, another Aboriginal artist, in the mid-1980s. Diane Moon, Maningrida's arts advisor at the time, helped foster Yarinkura's artistic talent as a bark painter and fibre artist with later potential as a sculptor as well. Bob Burruwal participated in male-dominated fields such as bark painting and hollow log coffins; his practice influenced Yarinkura to incorporate those ideas into her fibre forms, morphing these fibres into structural painted artworks such as animals, spirits, and ancestors, using traditional materials like pandanus fibres and natural earth pigments. Yarinkura later used the same artistic techniques required for twining pandanus to create more innovative figures such as the Ngayang Spirit, yawk yawks, dogs, and bush animals.
There was a period of time where Yarinkura and her family were the only ones creating this type of fibre art sculpture, that illustrate local myths and hunting stories. Overall, all of her creations stem from a place of "Dreaming" and her desire and yearning to express her knowledge rather than trying to satisfy the art market. Henry, Skerritt. 2021. “New Ideas from Old: Innovative Tradition in the Work of Lena Yarinkura and Kamarrang Bob Burruwal.” Art Monthly Australia, no. 330 (December): 86–91. https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/informit.168100999127798.
When Yarinkura ventured into bark painting and began carving hollow log sculptures, this change in media and overall scale motivated a shift in her work and overall approach to fibre. She began to make traditional long yam sculptures from paperbark, bound by string (made from kurrajong tree bark), and painted them with distinctive red and white ochres. During this shift, Yarinkura began to produce near life-size representations of the major ancestral cycles told by the elders of western and central Arnhem land.
In 1994, she and her husband first experimented with a new binding technique with Family Drama (1994), a group work depicting a traditional burial scene that included four human figures, a dog, and a raised platform. Accordingly, the two drew their inspiration from both ancestral creator beings (e.g., spirits such as Wurum) and everyday life (e.g., feral bush pigs).Keller, Christiane. "Culture Production Rembarrnga Way: Innovation and Tradition In Lena Yarinkura's and Bob Burruwal's Metal Sculptures." Australian Aboriginal Studies, vol. 2008, no. 1, 1 Jul. 2008, pp. 90 - 103. Yarinkura also made conscious efforts to reference some of the most important Aboriginal ancestral beings, such as the Rainbow Serpent (Ngalyod), in her works such as Sacred waterholes.
Not long afterwards, she bent the form once again, using nontraditional materials like bronze, tin, and aluminium to make these works. Along with her husband, they drew upon such fibre weaving and ceremonial object representations to adapt with new techniques of moulding with plasticine and construction for sculptures.Taylor, Luke and Peter Veth. "Aboriginal Art and Identity." Australian Aboriginal Studies, vol. 2008, no. 1, 1 Jul. 2008, pp. 1 - 3. To illustrate the stories that belong to her and her husband, Yarinkura made paperbark and woven sculptures of a range of spirit figures, dogs, yawkyawks (mermaid-like spirits), and crocodiles, which had precedents in men's ceremonial objects rarely seen after the 1960s. For example, she made five camp dog sculptures representing dogs in her real family; she comically made the dogs appear sick, angry, and cheeky.Jones, J. (2009). Lena Yarinkura. In N. Foreshaw & B. Parkes (Eds.), Menagerie: Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture (pp. 140–145, 162). essay, Sydney; Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design: Sydney; Australian Museum.
Yarinkura collaborated with Burruwal to make some of her acclaimed works, but after his death, Yolanda Rostron, her daughter, became her art partner.Skerritt, Henry. "New Ideas from Old: Innovative Tradition in the Work of Lena Yarinkura and Kamarrang Bob Burruwal." Art Monthly Australasia, no. 330 (2021). Yarinkura's generational knowledge, in particular the skills of basketry and pandanus-weaving learned from her mother Lena Djamarrayku, have been passed down to her daughter and, later, her granddaughter Philomena Kelly. As the Maningrida art market grew, she turned her focus toward coiled basketmaking.
Yarinkura held her first solo exhibition at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne, showcasing her fibre structures, further differentiating herself and becoming a more independent artist.
Urban Art Projects Yarinkura collaborated with the Urban Art Projects (UAP) in 1999 with Judy Watson.Teixeira, Muge Belek Fialho, Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Jared Donovan, and Kirsty Volz. UAP (Urban Art Projects): Transgressions Between Making, Craft, and Technology for Architects and Artists," In Proceedings of the 1st Annual Design Research Conference (ADR18), 27–28 September 2018, 310-15. University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, 2018. She developed a longterm relationship with the organisation, through a metal-casting workshop at Maningrida Arts and Culture Centre.Teixeira, Muge Belek Fialho, Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Jared Donovan, and Kirsty Volz. UAP (Urban Art Projects): Transgressions Between Making, Craft, and Technology for Architects and Artists," In Proceedings of the 1st Annual Design Research Conference (ADR18), 27–28 September 2018, 310-15. University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, 2018. UAP developed new casting methods based on Yarinkura's work, and together they later developed Seven Dogs, an art installation held at Brisbane Airport Skygate in 2010.Teixeira, Muge Belek Fialho, Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Jared Donovan, and Kirsty Volz. UAP (Urban Art Projects): Transgressions Between Making, Craft, and Technology for Architects and Artists," In Proceedings of the 1st Annual Design Research Conference (ADR18), 27–28 September 2018, 310-15. University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, 2018.
Artistic practice and impact Yarinkura and Burruwal's career was highly impactful in the artistic scene, inventing a whole new genre of art. Without their contributions, its likely that these new forms of fibre arts would never had come to fruition. As her works grew larger in scale and intricacy, Yarinkura became increasingly inspired to utilise the various traditional stories of her people to help narrate her works. She is known for redefining the boundaries of fibre art; her work transforms traditional techniques like twining, weaving, and netting into powerful visual expressions of cultural identity. She demonstrates the ability to integrate tradition with innovation in a manner that still highlights Aboriginal culture.
Although Diane Moon and Burruwal may have helped foster Yarinkura's artistic talent, Yarinkura states that noone specifically taught her how to use pandanus to make animals. She teaches herself and creates new ways to create these sculptures. Yarinkura views her artistic inventions as being highly integrated with her country, as she often attributes most her creations to the direct connection between herself and her country It is of great importance that she passes down these skills to her children and grandchildren because Yarinkura knows one day she will be gone and wants them to take her place.Rostron, Yolanda. "Ngalbenbe (The Sun Story): A Collaborative Installation by Lena Yarinkura and Yolanda Rostron." Tarnanthi 2020: Open Hands, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2020. Yarinkura's talent as a contemporary artist is recognised by many at the highest level, as her works are represented in almost every major Australian cultural institution and various significant private collections.
Known for her pandanus and fibre sculptures, Yarinkura's method weaving is similar to the process used for making a dilly bag or fish trap. She used this same technique of twining pandanus fibres to create the figures in her 1996 sculpture Ngayang Spirit, which included two human-like forms and a woven mat. Yarinkura's works often start with her harvesting the natural material from the local landscape near her outstation on her mother's Country called Bolkdjam, not far from Maningrida. Although Yarinkura does have a beginning process to her weaving, she follows her artistic liberties, allowing for spontaneity in the art making process.Moon, Diane, and Queensland Art Gallery. Floating Life : Contemporary Aboriginal Fibre Art. South Brisbane, Qld: Queensland Art Gallery, 2009.
Materials Yarinkura typically chooses to use natural materials which she harvests and collects from her local environment in Bolkdjam.Tina Baum, "Lena Yarinkura: Beyond the Weave" In Marking the Infinite, edited by Henry Skerritt (Prestel: Munich, 2016), 122-128. She used materials such as dayarr (pandanus), rulk (grass), warlpupurrunggu (bush turkey), nganarrngh (black cockatoo), feathers, and marnarr (red ochre), garbla (yellow ochre), gamununggu (white clay), and roerroe (black ashes).Jones, J. (2009). Lena Yarinkura. In N. Foreshaw & B. Parkes (Eds.), Menagerie: Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture (pp. 140–145, 162). essay, Sydney; Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design: Sydney; Australian Museum. Tina Baum, "Lena Yarinkura: Beyond the Weave" In Marking the Infinite, edited by Henry Skerritt (Prestel: Munich, 2016), 122-128.
Motifs and artworks